


No Voice to Cry Suffering

by bluemoodblue



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: (no death but the potential is there), (of a sort), Angst, Gen, Homesickness, Illnesses, On the Run, Other, Quarantine, Search for a Cure, Virus, and just sickness in general!, blood gunk, cognitive virus, contemplation of potential future death, curemother, i guess you could also call this season 4 speculation, i might have made Juno into a vessel but IT’S FINE HE’S FINE, season 3 finale speculation, seriously they’re gonna submit a Complaint, the worst roadtrip Sasha and Juno have ever had, this is a what-if scenario that i am throwing into the universe before it dies next week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-21 21:33:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30028146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluemoodblue/pseuds/bluemoodblue
Summary: “You went looking through our sock drawers for little glass vials of cognitive virus.” They’ve been over this before. The coincidence had been too much for Sasha to dismiss, and if someone had a virus and it’s cure… that was the kind of dangerous that Dark Matters worked against. Or utilized for the greater good, Juno had snapped out the first time, and Sasha had flinched - but not disagreed. She didn’t know. It killed her to say, it was written all over her face, but she didn’t know - and Juno believed her.He gets the same answer for his trouble: “The cure was there in a little glass jar. I had to be sure.” No sound for a moment but the nervous tapping of silverware on ceramic. “And I didn’t leave empty-handed.” The silence stretches into something painful.
Relationships: Juno Steel & Sasha Wire, Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel
Comments: 3
Kudos: 39





	No Voice to Cry Suffering

**Author's Note:**

> If you recognize that title, you _probably_ know where I’m going with this. If you don’t, it’s from Hollow Knight - you don’t need to know anything about the game to understand the fic, though (and please note that the quote is from later in the game, in case you don’t want to spoil anything for yourself looking it up)
> 
> (In a related tidbit, I listened to Sealed Vessel _so many times_ while writing this)
> 
> SO, one last what-if before we know how the season ends! Anyone else both nervous and excited! Because I am! Let’s console ourselves with unlikely alternate scenarios that give us a lot of feelings!

Speak it into the universe. Go on, say it out loud and see how closely the universe is listening, see if maybe something else hears you and descends like a swarm of flies, like an inevitability. Say it and see what happens. Just to know. Just to satisfy that deadly curiosity that’s been tailing you since the day you were born.

“Do you ever think that maybe you jinxed it?”

It’s an empty question, said mostly to fill the air - said mostly for the novelty of speaking. It’s probably not the first time he’s asked; Sasha’s giving him that unimpressed look that has “patient exasperation” written all over it. They do that a lot, the both of them - ask the same questions. A side-effect of only having each other for company, of creeping along the sides of society and through the back-alleys of human settlement in the solar system, of barely sparing a word or passing look for anyone else. An unavoidable consequence of being on the run with questions and no one else to ask. She doesn’t seem offended, at least, and that’s good because without her Juno might just fall silent completely. 

“Jinxed it? By bringing it up?” They’re alone and not alone in the diner on the far side of Neptune. There’s a waitress behind the counter, and a couple of teenagers in the corner booth. In a few hours the place will be as full as it ever gets, a stop along the way for long-haul freight transporters looking for company a little closer than the stars surrounding them. Juno and Sasha will be gone again by then; for now, though, the place is empty enough that Juno can sit tucked away in a back corner, at a distance, and they can both just breathe for a second. 

They’re always at a distance, these days. It’s practical - it’s safe. It’s becoming a state of mind. 

“Why not? The timing’s incredible - what’s that old saying? Speak of the devil, something like that.”

Sasha picks at a piece of pie, carried over from the counter before the waitress could drift too close. The mask Juno has on dissuades most people, useless as it is, but the service industry beats caution out of a person. “If memory serves, _you_ were the one who wanted to hear it. And… I had reason to believe that if two related radicals were in the wider universe, they’d be in the same place.” The last part is said with a heavy sigh, a kind of resignation. Her conspiracy theory hadn’t _quite_ panned out. Takes a lot, for Sasha Wire to admit she doesn’t know everything.

“You went looking through our sock drawers for little glass vials of cognitive virus.” They’ve been over this before. The coincidence had been too much for Sasha to dismiss, and if someone had a virus and it’s cure… that was the kind of dangerous that Dark Matters worked against. Or utilized for the greater good, Juno had snapped out the first time, and Sasha had flinched - but not disagreed. She didn’t know. It killed her to say, it was written all over her face, but she didn’t know - and Juno believed her. 

He gets the same answer for his trouble: “The cure was there in a little glass jar. I had to be sure.” No sound for a moment but the nervous tapping of silverware on ceramic. “And I didn’t leave empty-handed.” The silence stretches into something painful.

The first time they had this conversation, they’d been huddled on an escape pod with no destination in mind and a heavy, choking weight in the air between them. It felt like handling glass - too many sharp edges, too many accidental wounds left on themselves and each other. Juno had been so tired, but aware enough to be blindingly angry - at Sasha, at Dark Matters, at whatever had done this, at himself… at anything and everything. Juno had been angry at the entire universe; he’d burned with it. Sasha, across from him, was as cold as space right outside their flimsy hull and just as hard to reach. Her answers were as even and emotionless as if she’d pulled them out of a textbook, rote memorization while she absorbed the enormity of everything that had wildly careened to the side in her life in a matter of hours. They were hurting, the first time. Injured by a blow they couldn’t see and gasping for air, bruised and looking ahead and behind at the growing distance of how far they’d gone and how much farther they had left to go at the beginning of… whatever had just fallen into their laps. They ran out of things to say and sat in silence, in that parody of a dream Juno once had.

Today, they let the little fragment of the conversation lie where it fell between them on the table. Juno unhooks his mask and takes a bite of his own slice. “This is the worst pie I’ve ever had,” he says conversationally.

“No it’s not.” Her answer is easy, familiar - hard-earned. It took a long time for Sasha to start thawing around him again, and Juno pushes back the idea of _a long time_.

“The worst pie you ever had was that convenience store trying to convince everyone it could double as a bakery - Ma Bailey’s?”

Juno shudders, and Sasha almost laughs. “With the custard. Still can’t believe Mick ate ours, too.”

“Like a vacuum, and then he spent the entire ride home composing his will because he was sure he was going to die.” For a whole shining minute, Sasha is herself again, and Juno is okay, and this is just friends catching up. She pokes her pie, looks down like she can hide the way the face she has on is trying to crack. “If he knew we were here without him, we’d never hear the end of it.”

“Yeah.” How long has it been since he’s called Mick? Too late to think about that now; both of their communicators are on the wrong end of a mining shaft planets away. “He’d probably think of this as a road trip.”

“He’d do all of our vehicle repairs, even if we don’t own the vehicle.”

“Make us listen to that fuckawful station he _swears_ broadcasts everywhere in the galaxy.”

“Pull us into every tourist trap between here and the Outer Rim.”

It sounds nice, like a happy slice out of someone else’s life. Maybe they could borrow it for a while, that better what-if, sink a few hours into coming up with all of the details - glance at the door a few times like Mick Mercury might actually come walking in. Juno’s looked at a lot of doors like that lately, wondering if they’ll open and someone will be waiting just on the other side, like he hasn’t covered thousands of miles already. His brain isn’t picky - his imagination flicks through faces and he thinks he’d take any of them, any one that could find him here.

Juno looks down like he can hide the way his face is trying to crack.

He knows it’s coming before she says it, because the question is a new constant in their lives. “How are you feeling?” It’s not gentle; it’s a question asked with the detached urgency someone might express while examining the space-worthiness of their ship, and what Sasha is really asking is “What’s the countdown looking like?” She is, at least, kind enough not to phrase it that way aloud.

“I feel sick,” Juno mutters. “Big surprise.” He feels it squirming, writhing; it burns inside of him with a fevered sort of life, and if he pokes at it he can slip into the stream of its endless movement and _hear_ it. Juno hasn’t gleaned much of use from that exercise - it… speaks, in its way, but at a frantic pace that might pull everything Juno _is_ under with it if he follows too long.

“ _How_ sick?”

“Not ‘stop on the nearest abandoned asteroid’ sick. I can keep going.” Just a little longer, just a little farther. Just to the far reaches of the galaxy, if they can make it. Any empty hunk of rock will do if they can’t.

“Is it still…” Sasha motions towards her head with the hand still holding her fork.

“Still in there, yeah. It can’t get to you, Sasha. I’d know - I’d tell you.” He’d make her well again before she even knew there’d been a breach.

She’s frowning. She’s not as solid as she’d like to look, not as sotic; it’s the price of the time they’ve been spending together, the choice she’s made that puts her here, Juno thinks. “I know that.”

The two of them eat their pie. They watch the waitress clean tables that are already sparkling and then sit behind the counter with a magazine, not bothering to pretend she isn’t bored. They startle when the teenagers laugh suddenly, the sound jarring to a couple of people who have gotten used to looking over their shoulders. Sasha takes the plates before the waitress has the chance to walk over, and she probably didn’t need to bother. Juno hooks the mask back over his face.

Speak it into the universe. Take your fucking chances that nothing out there is listening.

If Sasha spoke the virus back into existence, so did Juno - asked and answered as his damn curiosity demanded. But he doesn’t know that talking did it; they circle around the same questions in orbit because they don’t know _anything_. There was a broadcast on Osiris, last time. So was it the visuals? Was it the sound of the reporters talking about it that woke something that could wiggle and burrow into the mind? Maybe it was the ticker tape underneath, a deadly trap traced into letters that didn’t belong to any language the virus spoke but created a pathway in the synchronization of voices echoing the letters back. Maybe it was a phrase, like the mental programming in Rita’s spy streams. Maybe it was like the whistle used to train dogs, a sound or signal that no one knows is _there_ until they _know it’s there_.

Juno didn’t hear anything. He didn’t see anything. He just knew that he walked into the kitchen, and Rita was on the floor, eyes open and breathing but quiet in a way that was devastatingly _wrong_. He couldn’t wake her up. He shouted for help and there was no answer. And then the first flames of it started to lick at the inside of his head, grasping and digging, and there was only one thing left to try before he collapsed.

The sprint to the medbay was a crawl by the time he got there. He clutched the glass of the curemother’s container as it pulsed in time with his racing heartbeat, and he begged for the cure. Juno _begged_ , the thought so much and so immediate that it slipped out of his mouth into the air, _please, do something, end this, whatever this is please just end it_.

He almost dropped the glass as the pain twisted and changed shape inside of him. A pressure built and congealed and solidified somewhere in his head as something broken into pieces in his blood was reshaped, and while the curemother didn’t speak any words Juno knew how to understand, the feeling of smooth, cool glass under his palms sharpened in intensity and focus in a resounding message that he couldn’t ignore. It wasn’t the cure he’d asked for, but Juno was desperate. Juno would take anything.

The only one still coherent was Sasha. He placed the curemother on the floor and turned to find her behind him, barely hanging onto the doorframe. Juno didn’t know how she had gotten out of her locked room, and nothing mattered less because he could _hear_ her even though she wasn’t speaking. He could feel the fire in her head, and Juno reached out and held it. He held it with his own, and then Rita’s, then Buddy’s, Vespa’s, Jet’s. He felt heavy and dizzy with it by the time Sasha took his hand and led him to an escape pod, too sick and tired and full and hollow to question where they were going or why.

They sat in the pod for hours before Juno asked if she was taking him to Dark Matters. She didn’t answer; she didn’t look up. There wasn’t an answer in her head, either, not until they landed on some tiny station spinning out between stars and nothing, and she grabbed his wrist and pulled him into the cargo hold of a freighter. Even then, it was more of an instinct - an impulse. _Enough of this. I don’t have anything left to give. Enough_.

“No going back now,” she’d said, sitting down next to him and without a word about her sacrificed redemption. He didn’t ask if she was sure, just sighed and leaned his heavy head against the merciful cold of the ship’s wall; his anger was cooling and all that was left was the exhaustion. Why question it? He couldn’t do this alone - he didn’t want to be alone. Juno told her the only plan he had and she didn’t falter. Raised an eyebrow, dropped her own head to lean against the wall when she couldn’t come up with anything else, and hooked a couple of fingers around the hem of his shirt. Sasha would see this thing through to the ending, with him.

_And there will be an ending_ , Juno thinks while he stares out through the window. It’ll be quiet. The curemother took what he had and built a container in his mind, gave him the chance to siphon that fire away and hold it, just hold it. No answer but his own for what to do about it now. Maybe another Osiris for two as the virus starves at the edge of the universe (and who had decided it could be _cured_ when no one had ever had to cure it before), or maybe just the ticking time-bomb in Juno’s head going off all at once. Not yet. Juno doesn’t feel ready to give in yet; he’s sick but not sick enough. He’s tired, but he can run a little farther. Keep the people behind him a little safer, even if they never asked him for that.

(“Keep looking,” Sasha reminds him - by the week, the day, the hour. “You’re a detective. _Find something_ in there, in that thing, that we can use to fix this.”

Juno searches and he runs. He fights the virus even as he reaches his hand into its burning depths and hopes he doesn’t get pulled into the river. He tries not to wonder if the sickness he feels means the vessel in his head is already cracked, already leaking, might spill out of him with every word he doesn’t speak to anyone but Sasha, with every note he can’t leave behind him in explanation, and all he can do is run faster and search with both arms engulfed.

He doesn’t ever want to see those empty, sightless eyes staring at him again. One way or the other.)

Sasha looks like she’s eaten a lemon when she gets back to the table, and he doesn’t even have to ask her why. “Carte Blanche has been spotted.”

Juno ignores the leap in his heart; that’s not good news. He doesn’t actually want anyone at the door. “They’re worse than Dark Matters.”

“They miss you.” She doesn’t say it like it’s a good thing - she says it like it’s inconvenient and incomprehensible, as if she hasn’t run away with him across the solar system. “We have to go.”

“Our ride doesn’t leave for another two hours -”

“They’ve been spotted because they’re _here_.” And then, right on cue, the door opens.

Juno ducks behind a menu; he has a passable disguise with the mask on and the eyepatch thrown out, but that won’t help face-to-face. Not when his glass eye was stolen for him with a handful of others - when the memory of indignant protests is still fresh in his mind, along with the laughing reassurance that they’d been swiped from a doctor overcharging clients to the extreme. Not when Peter Nureyev painstakingly found a near-perfect match to his other eye after spending too long staring at his choices, after it almost got him caught, after he told Juno with a kiss that the risk had absolutely been worth it, which one would he like to try on first?

Nureyev sits down at one of the diner stools, looking carefully put together in a way that Juno knows could be pulled back apart with one tug on the wrong string. Not that the waitress, perfectly charmed, could tell - his act is flawless, as always.

It’s so hard not to stare. Juno hasn’t seen Nureyev since the wedding, since Dark Matters and Sasha showed up and the dominoes of his new life kept tipping over one by one. Nureyev must have gotten back to the Carte Blanche safely, at least, if he’s here with them. He must be okay - they’ll keep him okay, Juno tells himself, even if he looks that tired.

Juno would give anything to talk to him. Juno would give anything to explain why Nureyev found Juno gone, again. That he wants to go home. By any entity out there listening, Juno wants to go _home_.

But he can’t speak. Juno doesn’t speak a single poison-laced word. He sits across the room and waits for Nureyev to look up and see him.

Nureyev doesn’t look up, not when Sasha stands and nods to the restroom, not when Juno finally lets the flimsy, plastic-covered paper drop back down on the table, not when Juno waits a beat, then two, then stands to follow Sasha out. If he’s there looking for Juno, then why…

He stands and waits, breath held, for one long and pained throb of his heart. _Oh, Nureyev_.

He isn’t. Nureyev isn’t here for him, and Juno knows it for sure when he finally looks up and glances through Juno for an instant as he passes - he doesn’t see Juno because he doesn’t expect to, because Juno should be on the Carte Blanche right now without him. If Juno had to guess, if Juno had enough time to take a good look at the parking lot outside, he would bet good creds that the Ruby 7 was out there alone. 

He wants to ask and knows he can’t. _Do you want to go home, too_ , he wonders. He keeps the thought carefully to himself, through the door, through the window, taking off at a sprint to catch up to Sasha.

_I’ll come back_ , he thinks, and because it’s quiet and empty and safe in the expanse of concrete, Juno has the nerve to say it out loud. “I’ll come back,” he whispers behind him. The wind snatches his words, and not even Sasha can hear him, just ahead of him and trusting him to be behind her.

Speak it into the universe.

“I’ll come back to you, I swear. I never wanted to leave you behind.”

Make it so.

“I’ll come back, and we’ll go home. Wait for me. Trust me.”

Maybe the universe is listening.

**Author's Note:**

> Juno and Nureyev, both on the run from their family, pointing at each other across this diner like that one spiderman meme.
> 
> Also, somewhere in space Buddy is demanding “Where is my FAMILY”
> 
> (If... if it helps Juno is definitely gonna cure this with the power of being a kickass detective and also the love and support of his family. Who are absolutely more relentless than Dark Matters in tracking him down. It’ll be FINE)


End file.
